São Paulo Hosts Unprecedented Exhibition by American Artist Man Ray

SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL – “I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive. I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence,” said Man Ray (1890-1976), who was a painter and a photographer, filmmaker and sculptor, one of the great exponents of avant-garde movements such as Dada and Surrealism. Man Ray is known for exploring photography and raising it to the level of art.

Some of these features of the American artist will be on display from Wednesday, August 21st, at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (CCBB), in downtown São Paulo. The Man Ray in Paris exhibition, free admission, can be visited through October 28th and is sponsored by the Ministry of Citizenship and the Banco do Brasil.

It is the first time that 255 of the artist’s works will be shown to the public in Brazil. There are objects, videos, and photographs of various sizes, created during the years when he lived in Paris — 1921 to 1940 — regarded as his period of greatest creative ebullience. The curator is Emmanuelle de l’Ecotais, a specialist in the artist’s work and responsible for his Raisonée Catalogue. All the works belong to a private collection in Paris.

The exhibition

“The exhibition is unprecedented. It has never been shown anywhere in the world. It was designed for Brazil,” said Roberto Padilla, of the Artepadilla company that produced the exhibition. In an interview with Agência Brasil, he stated that this is a “very comprehensive” exhibition of the artist, featuring many of his main works. “It covers all of Man Ray’s major works, particularly the period when he was in Paris and which, by the way, is the most prolific period of his work,” he said.

The exhibition is divided into two categories: the first presents photography as an instrument of reproducing reality, focusing on his famous portraits, essays for Paul Poiret’s brand and photos for reports.

The second shows the manipulation of photography in the laboratory, in which he created superpositions, solarizations, and rayographs (a term he created himself, using his own name), which consists of placing objects directly on a delicate piece of paper and exposing them to light for a few seconds). By revealing the paper, one obtains an image with inverted values.

In this second category, he invents surrealist photography. After quickly becoming a professional photographer, his work continuously fluctuates between commissions — portraits, fashion — on the one hand, and the desire to produce an “artistic work” on the other. In his words, “the artist is a privileged being able to get rid of all social restrictions, whose goal should be to achieve freedom and pleasure,'” said the curator of the show.

It is an educational exhibition that begins on the CCBB building’s fourth floor, with photos of Man Ray taken in the streets of Paris along with portraits of Duchamp, Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Gertrude Stein, among others. The third floor shows a more timeless Paris and his portrait technique, in which he retouches the negative and amplifies it in the impression, obtaining slightly blurred traces and softening the picture. The second floor, the largest space, displays his most surreal photos and his fashion photos, taken mainly for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar magazines.

The first floor displays the artist’s biography and some of his sculptures and collages, as well as a 52-minute video about the artist. At the museum’s entrance, visitors will also be invited to photograph themselves, their images will be shown later on a screen.

There are also scheduled screenings of films signed by the artist, a lecture with the exhibition’s curator and with photographer Pedro Vasquez.

After São Paulo, the exhibition moves on to Belo Horizonte.

The artist

Man Ray, a pseudonym, was born as Emmanuel Radnitsky in Philadelphia, United States, on August 27th, 1890. In his youth, he moved to New York, where he began his studies at The Social Center Academy of Art.

At that time, he met Marcel Duchamp and other artists who made up the Dada movement. In 1921, he left for Paris, where he joined the surrealist movement and combined his work as a renowned photographer with his artistic side, manipulating photos in the laboratory for the production of works of art.

During the Second World War, he returned to the United States, photographing celebrities and taking fashion photographs. When the war ended, he returned to Paris, where he died in November 1976.